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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Spy Games: Inside the convoluted plot to bring down WikiLeaks

In November, when a major U.S. bank wanted a strategy for taking down WikiLeaks, [CEO of HBGary Federal Aaron] Barr immediately drafted a presentation in which he suggested “cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project . . .”

Faking documents seemed like a good idea, too, documents which could later be “called out” so as to make WikiLeaks look unreliable.

And Barr wanted to go further, pushing on people like civil liberties Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald — apparently hoping to threaten their livelihoods. “These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals,” he wrote. “Without the support of people like Glenn WikiLeaks would fold.”